Latest Reviews

Every review below has been read and approved by a moderator. Newest first.

Shockbyte

RAMBOWORKSALONE Verified

· hosted 1–6 months

2.2

Okay

Shockbyte offers a range of game server hosting options at competitive prices. Setup is generally straightforward, and the overall experience can vary depending on the game, location, but support response times can vary. Overall, a decent budget option, though there are other hosts worth comparing.
Score breakdown
Performance 2.0
Support 2.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 2.0
Uptime & reliability 2.0

Citadel Servers

MrHobbs_ Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · 6GB

4.4

Good for a school club

I run a server for a school club, so my requirements are unusual: it needs to be simple enough that a fourteen year old can be given limited access without breaking anything, and it needs to be reliably up at the same time every week. Both of those have been true. Sub-accounts with restricted permissions work properly, and the scheduled restart has never once failed to fire. The control panel is dated looking but I would much rather have dated and predictable than pretty and surprising.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

AA Game Hosting

wattson_hz Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · Standard 10 slot

5.0

Good ping for a group spread across Europe

Our group is split between the UK, Germany and Poland, so somebody always used to get a bad deal. The location options here meant we could land somewhere that put everyone under 40ms, which has made a noticeable difference to how the game feels. Uptime has been fine, and the two tickets I have opened were answered the same day. Price is middling. I would pay it again for the routing alone.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Ascend Servers

grimbarrel Verified

· hosted 1–2 years · 12GB

4.2

Support answered at 3am and actually fixed it

The thing I judge a host on is what happens when something breaks outside office hours, because that is always when it breaks. We had a disk issue in the early hours and I had a reply in about twenty minutes from someone who could actually do something rather than someone reading a script. Server was back before most of the community noticed. Everything else has been unremarkable in the good way. Restarts are quick, the scheduler works, and I have not had to think about it much.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Sandbox Hosting

TinManTom Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 4GB

4.0

Cheap tier that is actually usable

I expected the entry plan to be a bait tier and it is not. Six of us play most weekends and it has never stuttered for what we do. The panel is simple enough that I could hand access to a friend and explain it in one message. I cannot speak to how it scales because we have never pushed it, but for a small group on a budget it has been exactly right.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 3.0
Value for money 4.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Sphero Solutions

Sn4keBite Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Standard

4.6

Two years, zero drama

I have had a small server with these for over two years now for a group of about eight friends. It has never gone down in a way I noticed, the backups have restored correctly the two times I needed them, and the panel has not changed in a way that broke my muscle memory. Support I have only needed twice. Both times a real person replied inside an hour and actually read what I wrote rather than sending a template. It is not the cheapest and I do not care. Boring is exactly what I want from hosting.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 4.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

Valheim Hosting

TinManTom Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 4GB

5.0

Cheap tier that is actually usable

I expected the entry plan to be a bait tier and it is not. Six of us play most weekends and it has never stuttered for what we do. The panel is simple enough that I could hand access to a friend and explain it in one message. I cannot speak to how it scales because we have never pushed it, but for a small group on a budget it has been exactly right.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Host Havoc

DoomKitten Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · 6GB

4.0

Good for a school club

I run a server for a school club, so my requirements are unusual: it needs to be simple enough that a fourteen year old can be given limited access without breaking anything, and it needs to be reliably up at the same time every week. Both of those have been true. Sub-accounts with restricted permissions work properly, and the scheduled restart has never once failed to fire. The control panel is dated looking but I would much rather have dated and predictable than pretty and surprising.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 4.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

Shockbyte

bl1nk Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 8GB

4.6

Straightforward and it just works

Signed up, server was live in a couple of minutes, ping is what I expected for the location I picked. That is genuinely the whole review. I have restored a backup once after somebody did something silly with TNT, and it came back cleanly with about ten minutes lost. Nothing flashy here, but I have not had a single reason to open a ticket in four months.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

BisectHosting

Ravnsong Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · 16GB

3.8

Handles a heavy pack without complaining

We run one of the bigger kitchen-sink packs with about twenty regulars, which is genuinely demanding, and it has held 20 TPS through evenings that used to kill our previous host. Updating the pack is the part I was dreading and it turned out fine — the panel kept the world intact and I did not have to rebuild the config from scratch. Only real note is that the first-time setup took some reading. Once it was running it has been steady.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 3.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

PebbleHost

bl1nk Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 8GB

4.0

Straightforward and it just works

Signed up, server was live in a couple of minutes, ping is what I expected for the location I picked. That is genuinely the whole review. I have restored a backup once after somebody did something silly with TNT, and it came back cleanly with about ten minutes lost. Nothing flashy here, but I have not had a single reason to open a ticket in four months.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

AA Game Hosting

Osprey42 Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Dedicated 32GB

3.6

Moved three communities here and stayed

I have been running community servers for a long time and have used most of the well-known names at some point. This is the first host I have not felt the urge to leave. Hardware is quick, the migration help when I moved the third server across was genuinely useful, and billing has never surprised me once. The panel is not the prettiest but it exposes everything I need including proper SFTP and real logs.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

Sparked Host

Sn4keBite Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Standard

4.4

Two years, zero drama

I have had a small server with these for over two years now for a group of about eight friends. It has never gone down in a way I noticed, the backups have restored correctly the two times I needed them, and the panel has not changed in a way that broke my muscle memory. Support I have only needed twice. Both times a real person replied inside an hour and actually read what I wrote rather than sending a template. It is not the cheapest and I do not care. Boring is exactly what I want from hosting.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Kinetic Hosting

vexx_ Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 8GB

1.0

Four days for a first reply

Server went down on a Friday evening and I did not get a human response until Tuesday. The status page said nothing the entire time and there is no phone number, so I spent the weekend telling forty people I had no idea what was happening. When it did come back there was no explanation and no credit offered until I asked twice. The hardware was never the problem. I left because I could not defend the support to my own community.
Score breakdown
Performance 1.0
Support 1.0
Value for money 1.0
Control panel 1.0
Uptime & reliability 1.0

Scaleway

wattson_hz Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · Standard 10 slot

3.8

Good ping for a group spread across Europe

Our group is split between the UK, Germany and Poland, so somebody always used to get a bad deal. The location options here meant we could land somewhere that put everyone under 40ms, which has made a noticeable difference to how the game feels. Uptime has been fine, and the two tickets I have opened were answered the same day. Price is middling. I would pay it again for the routing alone.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Sphero Solutions

TinManTom Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 4GB

4.6

Cheap tier that is actually usable

I expected the entry plan to be a bait tier and it is not. Six of us play most weekends and it has never stuttered for what we do. The panel is simple enough that I could hand access to a friend and explain it in one message. I cannot speak to how it scales because we have never pushed it, but for a small group on a budget it has been exactly right.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

PebbleHost

SaltyBiscuit Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · 6GB

2.0

Fine at 4pm, unplayable at 9pm

Classic oversold node behaviour. During the day it was perfectly good, and every evening at peak the tick rate collapsed regardless of what we were doing. I spent weeks convinced it was our plugins. It was not — the same setup on a different provider runs fine on less memory. Support were friendly and completely unable to help, because the answer was that the machine had too much on it.
Score breakdown
Performance 2.0
Support 1.0
Value for money 1.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 3.0

Sandbox Hosting

TinManTom Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 4GB

4.8

Cheap tier that is actually usable

I expected the entry plan to be a bait tier and it is not. Six of us play most weekends and it has never stuttered for what we do. The panel is simple enough that I could hand access to a friend and explain it in one message. I cannot speak to how it scales because we have never pushed it, but for a small group on a budget it has been exactly right.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Citadel Servers

wattson_hz Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · Standard 10 slot

4.2

Good ping for a group spread across Europe

Our group is split between the UK, Germany and Poland, so somebody always used to get a bad deal. The location options here meant we could land somewhere that put everyone under 40ms, which has made a noticeable difference to how the game feels. Uptime has been fine, and the two tickets I have opened were answered the same day. Price is middling. I would pay it again for the routing alone.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 3.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 3.0

Hetzner

ClutchOrDie Verified

· hosted 1–2 years · Standard

1.2

Backups were on the same box

Lost about three weeks of a build because the node failed and the backups were sitting on the same node. That is not a backup and it should not be described as one. To their credit they were upfront once it happened, and they did not charge me for the following month. It does not really replace the world though. Take your own copies wherever you host. I do now, obsessively.
Score breakdown
Performance 2.0
Support 1.0
Value for money 1.0
Control panel 1.0
Uptime & reliability 1.0

DigitalOcean

mr_potato_pc Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · Starter 4GB

1.6

Cheap, and you can tell

Signed up on an introductory price that looked too good, and it was. The server itself worked, mostly, but I had two unexplained outages in the first month and neither got a proper explanation beyond "node maintenance". The bigger issue was the renewal. The price roughly doubled and there was no warning email, it just came out. That is on me for not reading, but it left a bad taste. Refund process was actually fine, to be fair. Money came back within a week without an argument.
Score breakdown
Performance 1.0
Support 1.0
Value for money 2.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 1.0

Nitrado

Ravnsong Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · 16GB

4.8

Handles a heavy pack without complaining

We run one of the bigger kitchen-sink packs with about twenty regulars, which is genuinely demanding, and it has held 20 TPS through evenings that used to kill our previous host. Updating the pack is the part I was dreading and it turned out fine — the panel kept the world intact and I did not have to rebuild the config from scratch. Only real note is that the first-time setup took some reading. Once it was running it has been steady.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Citadel Servers

wattson_hz Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · Standard 10 slot

3.6

Good ping for a group spread across Europe

Our group is split between the UK, Germany and Poland, so somebody always used to get a bad deal. The location options here meant we could land somewhere that put everyone under 40ms, which has made a noticeable difference to how the game feels. Uptime has been fine, and the two tickets I have opened were answered the same day. Price is middling. I would pay it again for the routing alone.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 3.0

OVHcloud

grimbarrel Verified

· hosted 1–2 years · 12GB

4.6

Support answered at 3am and actually fixed it

The thing I judge a host on is what happens when something breaks outside office hours, because that is always when it breaks. We had a disk issue in the early hours and I had a reply in about twenty minutes from someone who could actually do something rather than someone reading a script. Server was back before most of the community noticed. Everything else has been unremarkable in the good way. Restarts are quick, the scheduler works, and I have not had to think about it much.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

ScalaCube

bl1nk Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 8GB

4.8

Straightforward and it just works

Signed up, server was live in a couple of minutes, ping is what I expected for the location I picked. That is genuinely the whole review. I have restored a backup once after somebody did something silly with TNT, and it came back cleanly with about ten minutes lost. Nothing flashy here, but I have not had a single reason to open a ticket in four months.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 4.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Contabo

Sn4keBite Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Standard

5.0

Two years, zero drama

I have had a small server with these for over two years now for a group of about eight friends. It has never gone down in a way I noticed, the backups have restored correctly the two times I needed them, and the panel has not changed in a way that broke my muscle memory. Support I have only needed twice. Both times a real person replied inside an hour and actually read what I wrote rather than sending a template. It is not the cheapest and I do not care. Boring is exactly what I want from hosting.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Contabo

quikscoped Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 150 slot

2.4

Fell over every wipe day

Map generation on wipe day took upwards of twenty minutes every single week, and twice the server did not come back at all until I opened a ticket. For a game where the entire population shows up in the first hour after a wipe, that is close to fatal. When it was running it was fine. Ping was good and I had no complaints from players about lag mid-wipe. I moved on and the new host does the same job in about four minutes. Would not recommend for anything with a scheduled reset.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 2.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 2.0
Uptime & reliability 2.0

Survival Servers

TinManTom Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 4GB

3.2

Cheap tier that is actually usable

I expected the entry plan to be a bait tier and it is not. Six of us play most weekends and it has never stuttered for what we do. The panel is simple enough that I could hand access to a friend and explain it in one message. I cannot speak to how it scales because we have never pushed it, but for a small group on a budget it has been exactly right.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 3.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

Iceline Hosting

mr_potato_pc Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · Starter 4GB

1.8

Cheap, and you can tell

Signed up on an introductory price that looked too good, and it was. The server itself worked, mostly, but I had two unexplained outages in the first month and neither got a proper explanation beyond "node maintenance". The bigger issue was the renewal. The price roughly doubled and there was no warning email, it just came out. That is on me for not reading, but it left a bad taste. Refund process was actually fine, to be fair. Money came back within a week without an argument.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 1.0
Value for money 1.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 1.0

Ascend Servers

Sn4keBite Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Standard

4.2

Two years, zero drama

I have had a small server with these for over two years now for a group of about eight friends. It has never gone down in a way I noticed, the backups have restored correctly the two times I needed them, and the panel has not changed in a way that broke my muscle memory. Support I have only needed twice. Both times a real person replied inside an hour and actually read what I wrote rather than sending a template. It is not the cheapest and I do not care. Boring is exactly what I want from hosting.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

GameServers.com

Osprey42 Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Dedicated 32GB

4.6

Moved three communities here and stayed

I have been running community servers for a long time and have used most of the well-known names at some point. This is the first host I have not felt the urge to leave. Hardware is quick, the migration help when I moved the third server across was genuinely useful, and billing has never surprised me once. The panel is not the prettiest but it exposes everything I need including proper SFTP and real logs.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

GTX Gaming

AshFallen Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 16GB

1.8

Memory limits are not honest

Advertised memory and usable memory are not the same number here, and I found that out the hard way when the server started getting killed nightly about three weeks in. Support eventually told me the overhead of the container counts toward the allocation, which is a reasonable thing to be true and an unreasonable thing to bury. I upgraded a tier and it has been stable since, so the fix worked, it just cost more than the page implied. Speed and support were both fine otherwise.
Score breakdown
Performance 2.0
Support 2.0
Value for money 2.0
Control panel 1.0
Uptime & reliability 2.0

GPORTAL

bl1nk Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 8GB

4.8

Straightforward and it just works

Signed up, server was live in a couple of minutes, ping is what I expected for the location I picked. That is genuinely the whole review. I have restored a backup once after somebody did something silly with TNT, and it came back cleanly with about ten minutes lost. Nothing flashy here, but I have not had a single reason to open a ticket in four months.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Valheim Hosting

Osprey42 Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Dedicated 32GB

3.8

Moved three communities here and stayed

I have been running community servers for a long time and have used most of the well-known names at some point. This is the first host I have not felt the urge to leave. Hardware is quick, the migration help when I moved the third server across was genuinely useful, and billing has never surprised me once. The panel is not the prettiest but it exposes everything I need including proper SFTP and real logs.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 4.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 3.0

Valheim Hosting

Sn4keBite Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Standard

4.6

Two years, zero drama

I have had a small server with these for over two years now for a group of about eight friends. It has never gone down in a way I noticed, the backups have restored correctly the two times I needed them, and the panel has not changed in a way that broke my muscle memory. Support I have only needed twice. Both times a real person replied inside an hour and actually read what I wrote rather than sending a template. It is not the cheapest and I do not care. Boring is exactly what I want from hosting.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 4.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0

Sandbox Hosting

Osprey42 Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Dedicated 32GB

4.6

Moved three communities here and stayed

I have been running community servers for a long time and have used most of the well-known names at some point. This is the first host I have not felt the urge to leave. Hardware is quick, the migration help when I moved the third server across was genuinely useful, and billing has never surprised me once. The panel is not the prettiest but it exposes everything I need including proper SFTP and real logs.
Score breakdown
Performance 5.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 4.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 4.0

Sandbox Hosting

old_man_creeper Verified

· hosted 1–2 years · Standard

3.0

Fine, but I had to ask for the good node

First few weeks were sluggish at peak. I raised it, they moved me to a different machine, and it has been steady ever since. Credit for actually doing something about it. Small mark against for the fact that I had to notice and ask in the first place. Everything since has been quiet, which is what I want.
Score breakdown
Performance 3.0
Support 3.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 3.0
Uptime & reliability 3.0

ScalaCube

SaltyBiscuit Verified

· hosted 6–12 months · 6GB

2.4

Fine at 4pm, unplayable at 9pm

Classic oversold node behaviour. During the day it was perfectly good, and every evening at peak the tick rate collapsed regardless of what we were doing. I spent weeks convinced it was our plugins. It was not — the same setup on a different provider runs fine on less memory. Support were friendly and completely unable to help, because the answer was that the machine had too much on it.
Score breakdown
Performance 2.0
Support 2.0
Value for money 3.0
Control panel 2.0
Uptime & reliability 3.0

Survival Servers

vexx_ Verified

· hosted 1–6 months · 8GB

1.4

Four days for a first reply

Server went down on a Friday evening and I did not get a human response until Tuesday. The status page said nothing the entire time and there is no phone number, so I spent the weekend telling forty people I had no idea what was happening. When it did come back there was no explanation and no credit offered until I asked twice. The hardware was never the problem. I left because I could not defend the support to my own community.
Score breakdown
Performance 1.0
Support 1.0
Value for money 2.0
Control panel 1.0
Uptime & reliability 2.0

Hetzner

Sn4keBite Verified

· hosted Over 2 years · Standard

4.8

Two years, zero drama

I have had a small server with these for over two years now for a group of about eight friends. It has never gone down in a way I noticed, the backups have restored correctly the two times I needed them, and the panel has not changed in a way that broke my muscle memory. Support I have only needed twice. Both times a real person replied inside an hour and actually read what I wrote rather than sending a template. It is not the cheapest and I do not care. Boring is exactly what I want from hosting.
Score breakdown
Performance 4.0
Support 5.0
Value for money 5.0
Control panel 5.0
Uptime & reliability 5.0